


You Have to Believe

by FagurFiskur



Series: 30 day cheesy tropes challenge [29]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Has Self-Esteem Issues, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-07
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:03:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FagurFiskur/pseuds/FagurFiskur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean first notices that something is off on Wednesday. He's been tidying up in the bunker's kitchen (Sam cooked bacon that morning and now there are little grease splatters all over the counter), and he's so focused on the task at hand that he doesn't notice Cas is there until he turns around and Cas is, well, there.</p><p>There being about two inches in front of Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Have to Believe

**Author's Note:**

> 30 day cheesy trope challenge: #20 - Magic Spell
> 
>  
> 
> [The challenge](http://ghiraher.tumblr.com/post/37135733342/30-day-cheesy-tropes-challenge)
> 
>  
> 
> This one was kind of tricky for me since 'magic spell' is such an incredibly vague concept. I ended up going with the incredibly generic 'love spell' but whatever, at least it's done now. Just one more prompt to go!
> 
> Title taken from Magic by Olivia Newton John

Dean first notices that something is off on Wednesday. He's been tidying up in the bunker's kitchen (Sam cooked bacon that morning and now there are little grease splatters all over the counter), and he's so focused on the task at hand that he doesn't notice Cas is there until he turns around and Cas is, well, there.

There being about two inches in front of Dean.

Dean clears his throat. "Dude. Personal space, remember?"

Cas frowns and doesn't say anything, but he backs off and sits down by the kitchen table. He's staring at Dean, much in the same way he usually does (just because he's now human doesn't mean he still isn't just as weird and awkward. If anything, the fact that he can't fly away whenever he feels uncomfortable has made him even more of a social train wreck).

"Did you want anything?" Dean asks when the silent staring has gone on just a little bit too long.

"I..." Cas finally tears his eyes away from Dean to look around the kitchen. "I don't know. I came here for something, I think, but I can't remember what."

"Food?" Dean guesses. Cas looks kind of frumpy, like he just got up from taking a nap. He probably woke up hungry. "I was just about to cook dinner."

Cas nods slowly. Dean puts away his cleaning supplies and looks through the fridge for something he can whip up quickly. He ends up making an omelet - omelets can totally be dinner food, too - and Cas stays in the kitchen while he cooks, looking at the pan with a hungry expression.

The couple of times Dean turns around and finds Cas looking up at _him_ instead are probably just a coincidence.

\---

The kitchen incident was kind of odd but nothing Dean couldn't shrug off. Cas is pretty much always kind of odd, it's his default state of being.

But then, Friday morning, Dean wakes up and he isn't alone.

His first instinct when he wakes up, with arms unexpectedly wrapped around him and someone''s half hard cock pressing against his hip, is to reach underneath his pillow for the knife that isn't there. Then whoever is behind him burrows his nose in the back of his neck and oh, Dean recognizes that stubble.

He turns around (which is kind of difficult, given that Cas only tightens his grip on him when he moves, but he manages). Cas is still asleep, mouth hanging slightly open. It's kind of endearing, honestly, how relaxed he looks in his sleep.

Then Dean realizes that he's referring to his adult male friend as endearing, and he snaps out of it. He pushes at Cas' shoulder.

"Wake up," he hisses. When nothing happens, he tries to twist out of Cas' grip, but to no avail.

"Stop it," Cas mumbles, eyes still closed.

Dean scoffs. "Then let me go."

Cas huffs but he opens his eyes, blinking a couple of times. He peers at Dean suspiciously. "What are you doing here?"

"This is my bed," Dean sputters indignantly. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Cas raises his head and looks around. "This isn't my bedroom."

"It's _mine_."

"Oh." Cas leans back onto the pillow. _Dean's_ pillow, which he _stole_ , and that explains the crick in Dean's neck, if he's been sleeping without a pillow since whenever Cas crawled into his bed.

And speaking of Cas crawling into Dean's bed, now that he's awake, he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to leave it. Like, at all. In fact, he's burrowing even closer to Dean, and moving his hips in tiny circles and pressing his lips against Dean's neck-

"Whoa!" Dean wrenches himself free from Cas' grip, and the forceful movement sends him hurtling down on the floor.

Cas leans over the side of the bed. "Are you all right, Dean?"

"All right?" Dean echoes. "You were freaking _necking_ me! What the hell was that?"

"I believe you just said what it was yourself."

"Oh, screw you," Dean mutters before realizing, maybe not the best choice of words right now. Not when Cas was rubbing against him like an alleycat in heat less than a minute ago.

Something has to be wrong. There is no way in hell Cas would be acting like this if there weren't. Dean runs his hand through his hair. He has to do something about this. He needs to talk to Sam.

"Dean? Are you coming back to bed, or should I join you on the floor?"

 _Now_.

\---

Sam's reaction to Dean telling him about Cas' weird behavior is less than ideal.

"Dude," he says, frowning, "I'm happy for you and all, but I don't wanna hear about your sex life."

Dean feels himself flushing bright red. "It's a spell," he says, "or _something_. Cas would never come onto me in a million years if it weren't."

Sam gives him a disbelieving look and Dean just _knows_ from the unimpressed slant of his eyebrows that he's thinking something stupid and pretentious like 'the lady doth protest too much'. "Point is, we need to figure out what's wrong with Cas, before he does something he might regret."

"Like you?" Sam quips with a shit-eating grin on his face.

Dean feels fully justified in punching his arm.

\---

An hour's worth of research leads them to a detection spell, in order to find out what’s wrong with Cas. Granted, Sam did most of the research, since Dean kept getting distracted by Cas getting all up in his space and touching him in increasingly inappropriate ways. Now that he's actually touched Dean, it seems he can't stop. Cas stubbornly insists that he feels fine, and that he'd feel even better if Dean would just touch him back.

Sam takes care of the spell casting since Dean’s still having his concentration thrown by being groped by a horny former angel. Whatever it turns up is impossible for Dean to spot, but Sam assures him that something is there - he describes it as colors swirling around Cas, only he's somehow able to read them.

"It's not a spell," Sam says. "More like a... curse, I think? It's brought on by Eros, for..." he trails off, squinting at Cas, who is staying happily still because Dean is holding his hand, "disrespecting his image. Which basically means, Cas grabbed him in a bad place."

"Been doing a lot of that lately," Dean mutters. "Wait, how did Cas molest an ancient Greek god and none of us noticed?"

"He touched his image," Sam explains. "A… statue, or something." He hums thoughtfully. “Hey, didn’t Professor Duncan have a statue of Eros in his office?”

Dean frowns. They'd met with a Professor Duncan about a case, he recalls dimly, but that had been two weeks ago. Thinking back on it, he remembers the weird statue of a dude with a hard-on. The very same statue Dean had dared Cas to touch while the Professor wasn't looking. Which Cas had only agreed to because Dean promised to buy him a beer if he did.

Well, shit.

"How do we fix it?" Dean asks.

"It wears off on its own," Sam says, still peering at Cas. "Should take a week or so."

Dean whimpers. "A week? Dude, I can't deal with him like this for that long."

"So go somewhere else," Sam suggests. "The curse should ease up once Cas doesn't have you in his line of sight every time he turns his head."

"Why should I have to leave? Cas is the one who grabbed the angry god in the no-no place."

Sam purses his lips, clearly annoyed. "Cas is also the one who is under a lust curse. And I'm guessing that's your fault."

"Why would you think that?" Dean asks even though technically speaking, since he is the one who dared Cas to grope the statue, he is the one at fault. Although it could also be argued that since Cas agreed to the dare, it's his own damn fault.

Sam raises his eyebrow. "Well, whoever's fault this is, we're not sending Cas off by himself. Using the elimination process, that means you've got to go."

"Is Dean leaving?" Cas pipes, finally looking up from his lap, where his fingers are laced together with Dean's. He looks so sad, his eyes wide and desperate, that Dean feels his heart clench in spite of himself.

"Just for week," Dean quickly reassures Cas, squeezing his hand. "You won't even notice I've left."

"Can't I come with you?" Cas pleads.

"That would kind of ruin the point." When Cas just keeps looking at him, all hurt and confusion, he sighs. "Just don't think of it as me being gone, think of it as me coming back a week from now. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that."

There's a long, tense moment, and then Cas deflates and nods. “If that is what you truly want. Even if it causes me pain to be parted from you.”

And Dean knows, he _knows_ that Cas is under a spell, and it's making him say these cheesy, awful things, but he still feels the tips of his ears turn red.

\---

Dean crashes at a nearby motel for the week. It sucks. The sheets are rough and smell of mothballs, and the pillow and mattress are both lumpy. The shower at least has decent water pressure, even though it's got nothing on the shower in the bunker.

Sam calls him briefly to check on him the first two nights. Then, on the third, he’s suddenly wanting to _talk_.

"Cas got cursed two weeks ago," he says, "and you just noticed this Friday."

Dean clenches his jaw. It has admittedly been bothering him, how he could have missed Cas' behavior changing like that. "Maybe it took a while to work."

"Not according to my research."

"You mean you reading Cas' colors.”

"He could have been resisting it subconsciously," Sam says, ignoring Dean's comment. "That would explain why he didn't climb into your bed sooner. But it must have been having some effect on him, and you didn't notice."

What the hell? Is Sam trying to make him take the blame for all this? "Neither did you."

"That's my point, Dean," Sam stresses. "Neither one of us noticed that Cas was suddenly in love with you."

"In love is maybe a little strong-"

"And maybe the reason we didn't notice," Sam continues pointedly, "was because it wasn't all that different from the way Cas normally acts around you."

"I'm hanging up now," Dean informs Sam.

"Dean-"

Dean ignores him and hangs up with vindictive satisfaction. What the hell is Sam trying to pull here? There's no way he's right, he has to be joking. Trying to play some mind game with Dean to get back at him for telling him the tooth fairy wasn't real or something.

Yeah. That has to be it.

Sam tries to call again a couple of times before giving up. Dean puts his ridiculous notion of Cas being in love with him out of his mind, except he doesn't, at all. In fact, he can't stop thinking about it.

It wouldn't make any sense, would it? Cas has always, as far as Dean knows, liked women. There was Meg, that reaper, and that Daphne chick he married when he had amnesia. They were all women (or close enough), and Dean is not. Therefore, Cas can't be in love with him.

... Of course, it's not exactly as if angels think so much in terms of gender. Raphael sure didn't seem to mind going from a male vessel to a female one. But Cas is different, right? And he isn't even an angel anymore.

Besides, even if he does like dudes as well as chicks, there's still no way he'd go for Dean. He knows him too well, has seen too much of him at his ugliest.

As Dean runs through every possible reason why there's no way Cas could ever be in love with him, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the pain it causes him. Thinking about how Cas is only cursed, it's not permanent or even real, makes his chest feel hollow and his stomach twist uncomfortably.

So Cas is definitely not in love with him. But Dean is starting to think that he might be in love with Cas.

At the end of his week in exile, Dean has psyched himself out so badly, he's considering just turning tail and running in the other direction rather than going back to the bunker. Pretty much only the thought of Sam's epic told-you-so bitchface if he ever found out how freaked out Dean's been this past week is stopping him.

That, and he's kind of worried about Cas. Whatever, friends worry about friends all the time. He’s allowed some concern.

\---

The bunker is eerily silent when Dean arrives. He puts his bag down by the door and, hand poised to grab the gun tucked into his waistband if necessary, slowly makes his way down the stairs.

After looking around the foyer, kitchen and briefing room, Dean finds Cas by himself in the library, sitting slumped over in an arm chair in the corner.

"Sam went out," he says, without looking up. The pointed way he keeps his head down is kind of freaking Dean out, to be honest. Is Cas really this embarrassed about what happened? Or worse, is he disgusted by the way he touched Dean, does he feel like Dean somehow took advantage of him? "He said he wanted to give us space to talk."

"Oh." Dean is going to kill his brother. "You know we don't have to, right?"

Finally Cas looks up, and for one moment Dean is terrified that the curse is still in effect, before he realizes that no, the intensity is at a normal (for Cas) level. His eyes are just really expressive. Could Dean really be blamed for not noticing the difference between normal Cas and cursed Cas right away?

"Perhaps not, but I think we should." Cas stands up, still keeping his eyes locked on Dean's, and Dean feels momentarily like someone punched the breath out of him. He'd forgotten how blue Cas' eyes are.

But he's not at all interested in hearing Cas explain how the curse messed with his head, made him feel things that weren't really there, so he takes a step back. "I don't think so."

He turns to leave but Cas grabs his arm and spins him back around. He looks pissed - more than that, genuinely furious, but the fury is undercut by the obvious hurt reflecting in his eyes.

"Do not run away from me," he warns.

"Wasn't running-"

"This may be uncomfortable for you to hear," Cas cuts in furiously, "but you at least owe me the basic courtesy of listening to what I have to say. All the years we've been friends, I have earned that much consideration."

It's a dirty trick for Cas to pull, guilt tripping him like this, but what’s worse is that it's working. Plus, the warmth of Cas' hand still grasping Dean’s arm is making it hard for him to tear himself away. It's nothing like the affectionate, eager way Cas touched him last week, but it's still Cas, touching him.

"I need you to understand," Cas says, "what that curse did to me."

"It made you fall in love with me," Dean concludes for him. "I get it, I'm not gonna go reading into anything that isn't there."

Cas frowns, and his grip on Dean's arm loosens, though he doesn't let go. "The curse would have made me fall in love with you, regardless of how I felt for you before," he agrees. "But as it stood, all it did was loosen my inhibitions."

Dean is pretty sure his brain's just blown a fuse. There's no way he heard Cas right. "What?"

"I am sorry that you had to find out this way," Cas continues, seemingly oblivious to the way he just took Dean's world and turned it on its head. "But I am not sorry for loving you."

There's really only one way for Dean to respond to something like that. Namely, by backing Cas up against the wall and kissing him until they're both out of breath. For one split second, Cas freezes against him and Dean worries that he just made some terrible mistake, but then their positions are suddenly reversed and Cas is the one who's got _him_ pinned against the wall, his thigh pressing between Dean's legs, both hands clawing at his arms, trying to pull him impossibly closer.

Dean pulls away first, because his head is starting to spin and it's starting to feel scarily like he's about to pass out just from a really intense kiss, which would really kill the mood. Cas dives for his neck, and Dean is suddenly and sharply reminded of the last time he did that, just a little over a week ago.

"This is all you, right?" he asks, because now he needs to make sure. "This isn't some left-over thing from the curse?"

"The curse is gone," Cas reassures him, before sucking at the spot just above Dean's collarbone that makes him weak in the knees. "Sam cast another detection spell this morning to make sure of that."

"Good," Dean mutters distractedly, because how is he supposed to focus when Cas is doing _that_ with his mouth? Then Cas' comment actually registers, and Dean thinks about his brother, how he's going to react to all this. “Fuck.”

“Hm?” Cas inquires, still sucking what will probably turn into an impressive hickey onto Dean’s skin.

“I just realized, Sam was totally right about us. He’s going to be insufferable now.”


End file.
